The present invention refers to a dental hand instrument having a light source for diagnostic purposes.
The invention refers in particular to a surgical instrument employed by dentists for scaling and removing tartar and plaque from the tooth surface, commonly called a hand instrument, provided with a light source for illuminating the working area in the patient's oral cavity.
The hand instrument is provided with a transducer that serves to vibrate a hooked instrument called a workpiece that provides for removal of tartar from the tooth surface. Said workpiece has a through hole wherefrom a cleaning fluid which aids the cleaning operation on oral cavity can be discharged.
Plaque is a deposit of bacteria that forms through lack of hygiene or disease of the oral cavity; if it is not removed plaque creates the formation of tartar which is a calculus that forms on the tooth surface. The methods commonly used to identify plaque entail administering a plaque-revealing contrast agent to the patient in the form of liquid rinses or chewable tablets. Said contrast agent, of a neutral colour specifically not to stain the mouth, is partly absorbed by the tartar and is sensitive to blue light with which it reacts assuming a certain colour.
The next operation therefore consists in illuminating the patient's oral cavity with a blue light to identify the areas of plaque which assume a more marked colour and can therefore be better identified.
The hand instrument is subsequently used for removal of the tartar and plaque through vibration of the workpiece and spraying of the liquid.
Different types of hand instruments are currently known to the art. All the known hand instrument use iodine filament lamps which emit white light as their light sources. This is due to the fact that the problem of illuminating the working area in the oral cavity has been taken into greater consideration rather than that of diagnosis, although dental surgeries are well lit.
In fact, because of the need to have a light source that gives a high luminous energy the hand instruments according to the known art use iodine filament lamps that emit white light.
Said hand instruments according to the prior art have various drawbacks.
In fact, the need to first carry out the operation of diagnosing the areas of plaque and then remove the plaque by means of the hand instrument causes a pointless waste of time and possible lack of precision in the operation because the dentist must necessarily remember the areas of plaque shown up by the blue light.
The white light coming from filament lamps used only for illumination presents a further problem. In fact during the cleaning operation said light, entering into contact with the splashes of cleaning fluid coming from the hole in the workpiece, causes misting which prevents clear visibility.
The object of the invention is to eliminate these drawbacks at the same time providing a hand instrument that is simple to make provided with a light source used for diagnostic purposes.
This object is achieved according to the invention with the characteristics listed in claim 1.
Preferred embodiments of the invention emerge from the dependent claims.
In the hand instrument according to the invention a blue light is used as the light source so that during the plaque removal operation the dentist finds the areas on which to work already highlighted, treated beforehand with a contrast agent, with a consequent higher precision and greater operating speed.
High-efficiency LEDs that transmit blue light, that is with an emission spectrum having a wave length that ranges between 450 nm and 470 nm, can advantageously be used as the light source.
To overcome the problem of illumination of the oral cavity a mixture of light beams of a plurality of LEDs that emit at different frequencies can be employed in order to be able, through the known RGB combination method, to obtain a white light that allows optimal visibility of the oral cavity without the problem of misting.
The LED can be appropriately incorporated into the body of the hand instrument and the same power supply as for the transducer of the hand instrument can be used as the power supply for the LEDs with a consequent reduction in the size of the instrument.
Further characteristics of the invention will be made clearer by the detailed description that follows, referring to a purely exemplary and therefore non-limiting embodiment thereof, illustrated in the appended drawings.